new queer cinema

A stark black-and-white photograph from 1992 shows a group of young filmmakers and critics (among them Tom Kalin, Isaac Julien, Todd Haynes, Sadie Benning, RubyRich and Derek Jarman) after a panel at the Sundance Film Festival entitled “Barbed Wire Kisses.” The photo marks not just a moment in history, but a moment when a history would begin. Later that year B. Ruby Rich would call this gathering the “New Queer Cinema” in an article for the British film magazine Sight and Sound, a term that would simultaneously serve as nostalgia for an artistic movement that never arrived and a promise of what independent cinema could become.